It's Now Illegal To Sell A Ticket In New York For More Than $2 Over Face Value

By consumeristcareyJune 6, 2009

Quick, go buy scalped tickets while it’s still illegal to sell them for more than $2 over face value. The New York law allowing unlimited markups on scalped tickets expired last week, and Governor David Paterson has yet to sign an extension bill passed by the legislature. TicketsNow and StubHub are, of course, ignoring the law, because they’ve never been big fans of little things like laws or decency.

StubHub spokesman Sean Pate said his company has been following the action in Albany closely and was continuing to operate under the status quo.

“New Yorkers have enjoyed an open and free market for ticket resale for the last two years which has seen average resale prices decline sharply,” Pate said. “We have every confidence they will continue to do so once the governor has reviewed this legislation to continue the open resale marketplace for tickets.”

Assemblyman Richard Brodsky (D-Westchester), who has pitched capping the resale of tickets at 25% above face value, said brokers should respect the 1984 rules.

“The law is the law,” Brodsky said. “They shouldn’t be winking at it.”

The legislature is considering ways to ban TicketMaster from offloading tickets to TicketsNow at outrage markups. Any final legislation will likely include retroactive extension of the ticket scalping law, so go haggle while you can!